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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: List of 787 MS products
Date: 1 Nov 2024 17:46:03 GMT
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On Fri, 1 Nov 2024 06:23:32 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

> I don't know what a GPIO is, but I'm guessing it has something to do
> with input and output(?) — maybe for a camera? My WYSE 5070 has seven
> standard USB ports (five 3.x and two 2.x) plus a USB-C port that doubles
> as a Display Port. A speaker jack, a headphone jack, a 9-pin serial
> port, two standard Display Ports, an add-on VGA port and an Ethernet
> port. WiFi is optional. I do have a WiFi card on another WYSE 5070 but
> not on the one I use. I normally use Ethernet cables for my computers.

https://pinout.xyz/

General Purpose I/O.  The Pi breaks out most of the processor pins to a 40 
pin header. Some of them have alternate uses. For example the SPI can be 
used with accelerometers, temperature/humidity sensors, and other 
peripherals. The strictly general purpose ones can be used however you 
want. You can read inputs like buttons or use the outputs to activate 
LEDS, servos, and so forth. 

In addition to the processor pins there are 4 regular USB-A ports and HDMI 
so you can use it as a general purpose Linux box without going near to 
pins. 

The Pico, being a microcontroller has a similar layout but more of the 
GPIO pins have specific uses. Only GPIO 22 doesn't have an alternate use. 

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/Pico-R3-A4-Pinout.pdf


The Pico uses the RP2040 Arm Cortex M0+ processor.  The Pi 5 uses the 
Broadcom BCM2712 SOC based on the Arm Cortex-A76.  On the Arm world, 'M' 
parts are the microcontroller profile, and 'A' are general purpose 
application profile. There is also the 'R' realtime profile. 

There are extensions but the base ISA is uniform across all Arm designs. 
x86 tended to be the wild west and it's only very recently that Intel and 
AMD decided to work together against the shared threat. It's a late 
starter but the RISC-V people are doing the same. 

Anyway that's what GPIO means. More detailed:

https://s-o-c.org/how-many-gpio-registers-are-in-arm-processor/

https://www.hackster.io/raspberry-pi/projects

The Pi blurs the distinction between a microcontroller and microprocessor. 
That's why the argument that the Intel NUC was aimed at the Raspberry Pi 
market completely missed the point.

Windows on Arm as implemented by Microsoft isn't going to look any 
different than Windows on x86. It would be interesting to see what you 
could do with Windows on a Pi.